Take It Off

The new-burlesque scene.

The performer Dirty Martini, at the Slipper Room. She is regarded by many as the queen of the new burlesque.Credit Photograph by Pari Dukovic

As the curtain went up in the Slipper Room, on Orchard Street, one night last month, Dirty Martini, whom many people regard as the queen of the so-called “new burlesque,” stood on the stage in a gown printed, in sequins, with the American flag. “God Bless the U.S.A.” played in the background. Like Justice, she wore a blindfold and held a scale. But this was not a good position in which to negotiate the de-rigueur first action of a burlesque routine, the glove peel, and so she unceremoniously dumped the scale on the floor. To her joy, she found a pile of money in one pan. Now rushing, she took off her dress, hoping to find more money. Pay dirt! Bills spilled out of her bra and her panties. So she shed those garments, too, stripping down to pasties (red-white-and-blue stars) and a small merkin. Then she began eating the bills. (She told me later that she cleans them with antibacterial wipes before the act.) Quickly, in the drama, the money passed through her digestive system. The lights dimmed, she turned her back to us, and, with a great flourish, she began extracting a rope of rolled-up bills from her rear end. (“It’s a magic trick,” she explained.) She pulled it out and pulled it out—it was twenty-five feet long—and when she got to the end she gathered it up, saluted us, and exited. Martini calls this her “Patriot Act.”

Martini, whose real name is Linda Marraccini, came to the profession from an academic dance program, at the State University of New York at Purchase, but today’s burlesque queens arrive from everywhere: dance troupes, the theatre, the circus, strip joints. The movement started in the early nineteen-nineties, at a few clubs in New York. Now there are scores of them, offering burlesque shows for various audiences: highbrow, lowbrow, gay, lesbian, and a large group made up of tourists and couples on dates. The shows usually start around 10 P.M. and run well past midnight.

In America, burlesque’s heyday lasted from the nineteen-twenties through the forties. Films from the period indicate that, by our standards, the shows weren’t especially naughty. Still, various defenders of public morals were always trying to shut burlesque down. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia said that it promoted the “incorporation of filth” into our society. The Kings County district attorney claimed that burlesque was “largely responsible for sex crimes in the city.” (This conflict is the setting of the play “The Nance,” now at the Lyceum.) Eventually, the campaign succeeded. By the nineteen-fifties, burlesque was all but dead in New York.

Its rebirth is due, partly, to politics. Again and again, artists and commentators of the new burlesque say that it is a feminist enterprise, enabling women to enjoy their sexuality and take pride in their bodies. The artists are often buxom. Muffin tops, back fat, discernible bellies: here they are. Most important, from what I can tell, are big bottoms. In the sex shows of yesteryear, breasts were given the starring role. Today, they tend to be used for comic purposes, sort of as that-old-thing. The real kilowatts come from the rear end. Dirty Martini, size 16, probably has the most famous hindquarters in the business, but smaller women, too, make the most of what they have. Bunny Buxom, serving, in one show I saw, as the pickup girl—the person who comes out onstage to pick up the clothes that the other performers have shed—bent over, each time, from the pelvis, with her back to the audience, thereby giving us, despite the G-string, a clear view of what was between her legs. Every time she stepped onstage—even before she did anything—the audience began cheering.

The burlesque queens of the mid-twentieth century often had trim, Art Deco bodies, and they tried to be seductive. Lili St. Cyr, sticking her pretty legs out of a bubble bath, Sally Rand frolicking behind her seven-foot ostrich-feather fans: they were giving the audience suggestions, not facts. Many of the old burlesque queens also made a stab at dancing and, to pace the witchcraft, drew the act out for fifteen or twenty minutes. They had lyrical names: Blaze Starr, Tempest Storm, Mamzelle Fifi.

The new burlesque performers are wholly different. They do not try to lure. (In the audiences, I saw no men in trenchcoats.) Nor, for the most part, do the women dance much. Some can’t even move to the beat. What they do, mainly, is comedy. They pour Martinis out of shakers lodged in their cleavages; they sprout extra hands, which then feel them up. They don’t have naughty names; they have dirty names—Lucy Fur, Creamy Stevens, Fanny Fromage. And their acts typically last for only three to five minutes, the length of a song or two. Apart from, or together with, the claim that the new burlesque empowers women, the point that the performers most vehemently insist upon is that their occupation differs from stripping. The aim of stripping, they say, is sexual arousal for the men in the audience; the aim of the new burlesque is self-expression for the women on the stage and maybe, vicariously, for the women in the audience. In an atypically jokeless number, Julie Atlas Muz appears, gagged, with nothing on but a heavy rope coiled around her body. To the tune of “You Don’t Own Me,” she struggles free.

A major component of the comedy in the new burlesque is the note of amateurism. Props get dropped; so do lines. Jo Boobs, in her “Burlesque Handbook,” cautions against gowns that are hard to discard with the required disinvoltura. If a gown is too tight, she warns, you may, upon lowering it, inadvertently remove your panties. I have often seen an artist drop her dress and then, as she tried to kick it aside, have to kick and kick and kick—even reach down—because the hem has got stuck on her heels. Bra-unhooking may be another occasion of suspense.

Such mishaps sometimes make the new burlesque look like a back-yard theatrical, except naked, and this enlists our support. Often, the costumes seem homemade. (Often, they are.) I especially like the crotch-covering devices, required by most venues. For many of the artists, a G-string is not enough. In one act, Tigger, a male burlesque artist (men perform, too, but much less frequently), wears an animal mask, with cute little ears, over his penis. Elsewhere, he sports what appears to be a leopard-skin condom.

If you don’t want to be part of a burlesque performance, don’t sit in the front row. I did, and one of my guests got Julie Atlas Muz’s breasts rubbed in her face. The m.c., Jonny Porkpie (the author of a burlesque murder mystery, “The Corpse Wore Pasties”), wandered through the audience, drinking people’s drinks. That production, “Dead Sexy,” at the Elektra Theatre, near Times Square, was a burlesque horror show, and featured a performer named Donny Vomit doing various stunts. Having swallowed a sword, Donny picked up a large nail and began hammering it into his left nostril. Pausing, he looked at me and said, “You seem upset.” “I’m afraid you’ll hurt yourself,” I told him. “It could be worse,” he said. “I could be your kid.”

One important reason that audiences love the new burlesque is that it is truly, unashamedly transgressive. In two routines that I saw, a woman, in the finale, stuck her hand down the front of her panties and moved her fingers around vigorously, with clear meaning. Neo-burlesquers also like black humor. Jo Boobs, in her book, describes GiGi La Femme and Scarlet Sinclair’s cardboard-Titanic number: “Scarlet was the iceberg and GiGi was the Titanic, and they fell in love, but when they tried to make physical contact the front of the ship ‘broke’ open, spilling tiny people from the deck and exposing GiGi’s breasts.”

Despite such amazements, the new burlesque is not a revolutionary development but a late outgrowth of postmodern art. Like the work of some postmodernists (Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman), it is ironic, reflexive, exaggerated, historical, political, cheerfully sleazy. It is also tied to gay theatre. Dirty Martini says that at the beginning of her career she performed only in gay clubs. “Those people were the only ones who understood what it was,” she told me.

The new burlesque, however antic, and occasionally messy, is a serious art form. If an act is a dud, or if your feet stick to the floor, that surely happened in the Caffe Cino, too. Plus, you can have a drink while you watch, and the entrance fees are usually reasonable. (But they are variable. The Slipper Room is ten to fifteen dollars, but at the Box, a posh club on Chrystie Street, tables start at fifteen hundred dollars.) Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, and many other cities also have big new-burlesque scenes. Coney Island swarms with burlesque shows all summer. ♦

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